With the recently announced news that Bogota,
Colombia will serve as headquarters for the 2025 International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP), people are paying attention to a region that has been largely ignored by the international aid community over the past decade.
Since our inception in 2013, WVD has focused on the Western Hemisphere with a strong presence in Mexico (2017 and 2022 headquarters), Colombia (2019) and Bolivia (2023). During our 11 years, we’ve also led training missions to Venezuela, Ecuador and Haiti, while developing close ties with the Centro de Salud in Mexico, Profamilia in Colombia, Cemoplaf in Ecuador, and ProSalud, CIES and Marie Stopes in Bolivia. In response to growing demand, our primary partner, DKT, launched a very successful vasectomy clinic in Mexico City. We have witnessed that assumptions about machismo’s hold on the male psyche are far from 100% accurate with an extraordinary growth in numbers wherever we’ve worked.
For the past two years we’ve been fortunate to have on board Lic. Silvana Resendy Birhuett who has taken on the role of regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Silvana, half Brazilian and half Bolivian, speaks both Portuguese and Spanish and has worked over 25 years promoting reproductive health and rights.
To solidify our presence in the region, Silvana Resendy Birhuett is currently on a multi-country tour that will take her to Panama, El Salvador, Mexico and Argentina. From April 15-17th she’s in Panama City attending the forum, Visualizing the Future for FP2030. The event brings together the main organizations committed to family planning in the region, including UNFPA, ProFamilia from Colombia, Save the Children and of course, the organizers of FP2030. Once again, we’re the only ones specifically advocating for the inclusion of men as compassionate and responsible partners in reproductive health decision-making, giving us a unique role to play in these meetings.
On April 21, Silvana leaves for El Salvador
for three days of intensive visits with the country’s Ministry of Health with the intention of designing and developing a multi-year vasectomy program for the entire country. Given the challenge of creating order in El Salvador, a program that celebrates positive masculinity has been highly welcomed.
From El Salvador, Silvana returns to Mexico for meetings with our key partners at Centro de Salud and DKT.
Mexico has played a pivotal role in our growth and we continue to work with them to build our program in the region. To give some context, in 2016, when we arrived numbers of vasectomies were about 16,000. In 2023, the numbers surpassed 70,000 in the public sector alone.
The trip concludes in Argentina in early May with the participation of WVD in COSAPRO –
the Congreso de Salud Provincial – and is a follow up to our previous trip in December, 2023. The event brings together doctors from across the country and provides a stage to announce our decision to hold WVD 2025 in Argentina. More to follow, but the excitement and energy already generated with our partners at the Ministry of Health, bodes well for what we expect to be a huge step forward for vasectomy in their country.
